Revision as of 05:48, 6 July 2009

Features

Form Factor Micro-ATX

Socket LGA775

This board seems like a great candidate for an HD frontend. It fits the micro atx form factor, has an integrated "HD" audio chipset (Intel's successor to the ubiquotous 8x0 found on many older nForce boards), has VGA, DVI, component, composite and S-Video out and uses AMD's AM2 socket.

The board is based on the NVIDIA GeForce 6150 GPU and NVIDIA nForce 430 MCP. This GPU uses a shared memory architecture.

Issues

Many users have reported that the stock 0303 BIOS version is buggy. Asus does have a BIOS update available, but this does not seem to address all the issues (which included APIC bugs and IRQ conflicts when enabling all onboard peripherals).

While the latest ALSA drivers go a long way in improving hda-intel support, getting this working is still quirky at best. See this forum post for details: [1].

Another sound issue with this board is that while the motherboard does have a header for S/PDIF output, Asus does not include the digital out module which is available as ASUS part number C1B61P.
There is a simple S/PDIF TTL to COAX circuit which works perfectly with this board here: [2].